Sunday, January 13, 2008

outside reading blink fina top ten

Top ten listHere are ten thing that I learned or stories that I read in my book1. Malcolm GladwellMalcolm was a staff writer at the New Yorker magazine he has won a national magazine award and was named one of the 100 most influential writers in magazines. Another well-renounced book he wrote was the tipping point: how little things make a big difference. Both of his books have been on the New York Times bestseller list. He was born in England and grew up in Ontario and graduated from the university of Toronto trinity collage with a degree in history. He has also been a reporter for the Washington post and used lots of scientific research to complete this book.2. The statue that just didn’t look right.At the Getty museum a while ago a guy brought a statue to them, which was supposed to date back to the 6th century, but it didn’t look right. Nothing was broken off or anything and there wasn’t much damage that would be rare if it really was that old. So with many scientist they ran a variety of tests and all kept pointing back to it actually being that old so they bought it but when it went on display many other people who viewed it said the same thing so they brought it back to where it supposedly came from and some one their said they hoped they hadn’t actually bought it because it was most likely a fake. And with further research they found ways that the statue could have been counter fitted to seen like it was real.3. Tennis double faultsVic Brandon is a top world tennis coach and after watching many games he noticed that right before someone double faulted he knew they would. Double faulting is rare among experienced tennis players so Vic started to calculate how accurately he guessed and amazingly enough he was almost always 90 to 100% correct and it didn’t matter if the game was on TV or in person previously recorded or anything. So hoe tried to see if it was a movement they were doing that told him but he couldn’t find anything and that’s because your brain can just process so much information subconsciously with out you even knowing it's happening.4. Priming peoplePriming is a process that has to do with your subconscious affecting your movement without you knowing it. One experiment had to do with tests and before a standard test using all African Americans half was a asked to identify their race and the other half wasn’t the half that wasn’t asked did amazingly better then the other half because when the others were asked about race it put a negative stereo type in their head which made them believe they were worse so they invariantly did worse this was also demonstrated in other tests.5. Doctors law suitsTheir was a study done about doctors and which ones get law suits and the data had nothing to do with how good of a doctor someone was or where they went to collage. It had to do with how their personality came off to people. They averaged time that the doctors talked to the patience and the ones with greater time got sued less and they also looked at a range of emotions that they poses and the ones with worse dominating or uncaring tones got sued.6. Dorm room observersAnother test they did to demonstrate thin slicing took dorm rooms and had both strangers and close friends evluate a long list of characteristics just by looking at someone’s dorm room. And in most cases they were very accurate. They tried to make the amount of information smaller a d smaller to see how accurate they could get making the slices thinner and thinner.7. Abby Conant tromboneThe audition for the royal opera of turin was held with a screen so you could only hear them, a women Abbie was chosen above all they expected a man and when a woman was chosen they were surprised because the trombone is a masculine instrument but she passes with flying colors all the tests and after a while had became second chair but they refused to make her first because a leader couldn’t be a women so she pressed charges and won and proved though other blind test that she was the best player.8. GamblersWhen gambling you don’t know what to do you have to guess and hope you guess right so you can win. A test was put out with a blue and red deck the red deck had things that were bad and blue good cards. After a while the gamblers figured it out but even in the beginning they started to back away from the red cards and when fitted with sweat level sensors every time a red card turned the levels spiked. This showed how the gamblers started at the beginning subconsciously processing tons of information with out them knowing it and fitting it to their behavior.9. Speed datingSpeed dating presents many of the theorems in this book like how instantly you can just like someone or know that they are a good person or at least seem so. Also it demonstrates the locked door of how we don’t know why we know these things. The people speed dating were asked to describe why they chose who they chose but not many could come up with good answers they just liked that person and they didn’t know why and that’s because it was done in their subconscious.10. How I can use this in my lifeI think you can use this information everyday in your life if you want because everything relates to you. If you want you can analyze what you think and apply the theories he talks about. Or you can use his theories and test them in your life to see their accuracy. The most useful thing I think in this book though is how to use what every example test theorem and even the title of the book and that’s the who thing of gut reactions which is what I try to do now.